Sunday Summary – December 10, 2017

There’s still time to Buy Your Ticket Today for the streets.mn Winter Fundraiser Party! for Tuesday night. Click through to buy your ticket (or click the button to the right) and read six great reasons Bill Lindeke gives for why you should attend. If you can’t join us, there are many ways to enjoy the season even if you don’t like all of it. Hannah Pritchard says I Hate Christmas…but I Love the Lights saying, “After years of renting, my feelings about being able to light the street are akin to my sheer joy at shoveling snow. I get to help! Nobody is going to be depressed or slip on my patch of sidewalk. The bushes we planted last year to eventually give us a little privacy on the porch have grown big enough this year to hold a 50-bulb strand of lights. I’m so proud of them; we’re hoping next year they’ll graduate to 100s.”

Bikes

Walker Angell asks Who Will Ride; How Far, When, On What ? “A very common comment from people is that they don’t ride a bicycle because they don’t feel safe on our streets. This is largely a universal human condition and not limited to just the U.S. Dutch folk feel no more comfortable in various situations than U.S. folk. And this is what drives transportation engineering in The Netherlands — they make streets and roads that are safe and feel safe for all users.” This post looks at data about who will ride bikes and what design changes might make cycling feel safe and comfortable for more people. The comments continue the discussion about feeling safe from traffic and add consideration of how to make people riding (or walking) safe from harassment, too.

Transit (and a little more)

Riding Buses on Nicollet Ave has photos, but also questions from Kendra Sundvall, “I want to discuss transit stories involving the 17 and the 18 Metro Transit routes especially. What is the oddest in any form thing you’ve seen on the 18 or the 17 while on Nicollet Ave? Do you ride the bus with headphones in to tune out other riders? Do you listen in on others conversations? Read a book? What do you do on the bus? Do you thank and say hi to the drivers? Do you have something that you just CAN’T STAND on the bus?” Commenters give some answers (and you can, too). More pictures of Nicollet Avenue from Kendra in A New Corner on Nicollet.

The Quarterly Transit Report-December 2017 is retired transit planner Aaron Isaac’s update on Metro Transit changes and plans. This quarter, though, there’s a look back to Minneapolis streetcars in order to look ahead to what future streetcar lines might bring (and Aaron’s an expert as a long-time volunteer with the Minnesota Streetcar Museum and co-author of Twin Cities by Trolley and The Streetcar Era in Minneapolis and St. Paul).

The Mall QT minibus of 1971.

Particular projects

Can the West Loop Still Happen? asks Matt Eckholm, “If you asked one of the thousands of new Minneapolis residents who moved in since 2010 “What are the borders of North Loop?”, you may find they consider the western border to be the 4th Street freeway viaduct. Despite the neighborhood continuing on west up to I-94, the viaduct walls off a landscape of low density industrial and parking lots from the fast growing neighborhood. It gets even worse from the other side of difficult-to-cross 7th Street, and the I-94 trench creates a final barrier, separating lower North Loop from an even more neglected corner of the city.” This viaduct-barricaded area has been the subject of some ambitious planning and this post reviews some of the thinking and considers changes both large (tearing down the 4th Street viaduct, for example) and small (striping bike lanes).